28.11 Grouping, Renaming, and Deleting Surfaces

Once you have created a number of surfaces, you can interactively rename, delete, and group surfaces and obtain information about their components. Grouping surfaces is useful if you want to perform postprocessing on a number of surfaces at a time. For example, you may want to group several wall surfaces together to generate a contour plot of temperature on all walls. To postprocess results on each wall surface individually, you will simply "ungroup'' the surfaces.

Manipulation of existing surfaces is performed with the Surfaces dialog box (Figure  28.11.1).

Surface $\rightarrow$ Manage...

Figure 28.11.1: The Surfaces Dialog Box

You can also open this dialog box by clicking on the Manage... button in one of the surface creation dialog boxes described in the previous sections.

Grouping Surfaces

As mentioned above, you may want to group several surfaces together in order to perform postprocessing on all of them at once. To create a surface group, select the surfaces to be grouped in the Surfaces list. You can define a new name for the group in the Name field, or you can use the default name, which is the name of the first surface you selected in the Surfaces list. Then click on the Group button. The selected surfaces will disappear from the Surfaces list, and the name of the surface group will be added to the list.

Note that the Group button will not appear until you have selected at least two surfaces. As soon as you choose a second surface in the Surfaces list, the Rename button will change to the Group button.

To ungroup the surfaces, simply select the surface group in the Surfaces list and click on the UnGroup button. The group name will disappear from the list and the names of the original surfaces in the group will reappear in the list.

Renaming Surfaces

To change the name of an existing surface, select the surface in the Surfaces list, enter a new name in the Name field, and then click on the Rename button. The new name will replace the old name in the Surfaces list and the surface will be otherwise unchanged.

Note that the Rename button will not appear in the dialog box if you have selected more than one surface. When more than one surface is selected, the Rename button is replaced by the Group button.

The surface name that you enter must begin with an alphabetical letter. If your surface name begins with any other character or number, ANSYS FLUENT will not accept the entry.

Deleting Surfaces

If you find that a surface is no longer useful, you may want to delete it to prevent the list of surfaces from becoming too cluttered. Select the surface or surfaces to be deleted in the Surfaces list, and then click on the Delete button. The delete operation is not reversible, so if you want to get a deleted surface back again you will need to recreate it using one of the surface-creation dialog boxes described in the previous sections.

Surface Statistics

You can also use the Surfaces dialog box to retrieve topological information about surfaces. Points is the total number of nodes in a surface. 0D Facets is the number of isolated nodes in a surface (i.e., nodes that have no connectivity, such as point surfaces or nodes in a rake), 1D Facets is the number of linear faces (consisting of two connected nodes) in a surface in a 2D problem, and 2D Facets is the number of 2D faces (triangular or quadrilateral) in a surface in a 3D problem. Note that an interior zone surface in a 3D problem consists of 2D facets, and similarly an interior zone surface in a 2D problem consists of 1D facets.

These statistics are listed for the surface(s) selected in the Surfaces list. If more than one surface is selected, the sum over all selected surfaces is displayed for each quantity.

Note that if you want to check these statistics for a surface that was read from a case file, you will need to first display it.